Hurd Talks Oracle Exadata, Stays Mum on HP

Oracle Co-president Mark Hurd may have avoided mentioning Hewlett-Packard
during his keynote at the Oracle OpenWorld conference Sept. 20, but he had no
shortage of things to say about Oracle.

The same day as Hurd's keynote speech, his former employer confirmed that a
settlement had been reached with the former CEO.
Hurd resigned from HP in August after a scandal and was hired by Oracle in
September. In announcing the settlement, HP and Oracle reaffirmed their
strategic partnership, which Oracle CEO
Larry Ellison was quoted as saying had "lasted for over 25 years."

If Hurd was looking back, he gave no indication. Instead, he used his
keynote to point out Oracle's success.

"Oracle had a big Q1," he told the audience. "Why is that
important to you? It gives the company the capacity to invest,
[the] capacity to invest in R&D and support."

One of the results so far is an upgrade to the Oracle's Exadata Database Machine.
With Exadata X2-8, the company is promising more storage capacity and
faster database processing speeds. The machine now comes in four
configurations: the new Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack system, and the Oracle
Exadata X2-2 quarter-rack, half-rack and full-rack systems. Both the X2-8 and
the X2-2 can scale to multirack configurations, the company said.

Data warehouses historically have had four technical problems, Hurd
explained: One, enterprises generate lots of data. Two, people want access to
that data. Third and fourth, people ask hard questions and want
them answered-quickly.

"When those four things come together, systems fall apart ... You go out
to send a query, and you've got to go find the data, and that's why the queries
take so long," Hurd said. "Exadata, in its first release, changed the
game."

The latest release takes things a step further by beefing up processing
power, he said.

The X2-8 features "two eight-socket database servers with a total of
128 Intel CPU cores and 2TB of memory," the company said in a news release
the same day, as well as more than "5TB of Exadata Smart Flash Cache to
cache frequently accessed 'hot' data." In addition, the X2-8 "provides
the ability to query fully encrypted databases."

"Security of data is a big issue," Hurd said. "If I put my
data in one place, I want to make sure it's secure. Full database encryption
for security, and in addition you now have the choice of Linux or Solaris.
Oracle Exadata is now best in class for all database workloads. With the memory
we now have in this system, the added speed, we can now do OLTP [online transaction
processing] workloads better than anybody on the planet."